ImageMagick Tricks Web Image Effects from the Command Line and PHP Unleash the power of ImageMagick with this fast, friendly tutorial and tips guide Sohail Salehi BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI ImageMagick Tricks Web Image Effects from the Command Line and PHP Copyright © 2006 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: June 2006 Production Reference: 1130606 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 1-904811-86-8 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by www.visionwt.com Credits Author Development Editor Sohail Salehi David Barnes Reviewers Indexer Sven Henckel Mithil Kulkarni Gabe Schaffer Proofreader Anthony Thyssen Chris Smith Technical Editor Production Coordinator Rushabh Sanghavi Manjiri Nadkarni Editorial Manager Cover Designer Dipali Chittar Manjiri Nadkarni About the Author Sohail Salehi was born in Mashad, Iran, on March 18, 1975. He graduated in Software Engineering from Mashad University in 2000. In recent years, Sohail has contributed to over 20 books, mainly in programming and computer graphics. He has written frequent articles for "0 & 1 Magazine", an IT magazine from Ferdowsi University. You can find a complete list of his work at www.sohail2d.com. In the past he has worked as a Chairman in the IT department of various universities including Mashad, Ferdowsi, and the Industrial Management University. Currently he is working on the IT training standards for the Iranian "Work and Science Organisation" 2005-2006 period. Many thanks to my lovely wife Ghazal for being so kind to me during writing this book. Many, many thanks to every one at Packt who helped me create such a great book. Thanks to my very dear friend David Barnes for starting things off from the beginning, helping me nail down the concept, and accompanying me during various parts of this book. About the Reviewers Sven Henckel studied media informatics at the University for Practical Business Studies in Gütersloh, Germany. His diploma thesis was about the automatic generation of layout documents like QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. Before studying he worked as a developer and consultant for web applications. He currently works as an IT project manager for a European media service provider. He has developed a quality assurance system in which ImageMagick plays a very important role. Through the years he has attained specialized knowledge in the fields of Java, PHP, SQL, XML, and PDF. Moreover, he is interested in Open Source software, communication, and design. Gabe Schaffer has a degree in computer science from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he resides. He has been programming for over 20 years, has been doing photography for 10 years, and does both as a freelancer. He uses ImageMagick for automating digital photo labs. I would like to thank Maggie for putting up with my late nights reviewing this book. Anthony Thyssen is a UNIX and Linux Systems Expert with an interest in image processing tools for UNIX since 1996, and has released an unoffical patched version of the old NetPBM graphic tool suite. He has been a user of the command-line version of ImageMagick since its inception. In recent years he developed a Image Magick version 6 Examples website, http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/ graphics/imagick6/, as a practical users' manual for both new and old users of ImageMagick. He has also been involved in the debugging and development of the IM core software, specifically in the areas of Alpha Compositing and GIF animation optimization. Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 5 ImageMagick Features 7 ImageMagick’s Core Utilities 8 Display 8 Convert 8 Import 9 Animate 9 Composite 9 Montage 9 Mogrify 9 Conjure 10 Identify 10 Interfaces 10 ImageMagick and X11 standard 11 Summary 12 Chapter 2: Installation and Configuration 13 Where to get ImageMagick 13 What are the Installation Requirements? 14 Installation 14 Binary Installers 14 Source files 16 How to Install ImageMagick from Binaries 17 How to Install from UNIX-like Binary Releases 17 How to Verify the Program Installation 18 How to Install from a Windows Binary Release 18 How to Install ImageMagick from Source 21 Installing from a UNIX-like Source 22 What are Makefiles? 22 How to Use GNU Configure for Creating Makefiles 22 Configure Command in Action 24 Table of Contents How to Use the Make Command for LINUX 24 How to Build ImageMagick for the VMS Platform 25 How to Build ImageMagick for the Macintosh Platform 25 How to Build ImageMagick for the Windows Platform 26 How to Handle Bugs and Errors 26 Dealing with Configuration Failures 26 Summary 28 Chapter 3: Convert and Mogrify 29 Convert Syntax and Options 29 How to Draw Basic Shapes with Convert 30 Workshop I: Creating a Simple Logo 31 Painting Methods 33 Workshop II: Color Filling with –draw 33 Deformations 37 Workshop III: Image Distortion 39 Basic Transformations 40 How to Rotate Drawings in ImageMagick 40 Workshop IV: Rotating Text 40 How to Resize Drawings in ImageMagick 44 How to Crop Images Using ImageMagick 46 The –shave Option 47 Inserting and Deleting Rows and Columns in Images 47 Skewing Images 48 Workshop V: The Flag 48 Artistic Options 52 Workshop VI: Applying Various Filters on an Image 52 Mogrify Syntax and Options 55 Workshop VII: The Card 56 Summary 60 Chapter 4: Composite and Montage 61 Composite 61 Composite Syntax and Options 61 What is the Mask? 64 Workshop I: Colorful Logo 66 Composite Parameters 68 Workshop II: 3D Button 69 Workshop III: Fresh Candy 72 Montage 75 Montage Syntax and Options 75 Workshop IV: The Montage Descriptive Options 77 [ ii ] Table of Contents Workshop V: The Montage Adornment Options 81 Workshop VI: The Montage Arrangement Options 84 Workshop VII: Creating an Indexed Image Web Page 87 Summary 88 Chapter 5: Identify, Display, and Import 89 Identify 89 Identify Syntax and Options 90 How to Extract Information from an Image 91 How to get Brief Information from Images 91 How to get Detailed Information from Images 93 How to get Customized Information from Images 94 How to Get Information about ImageMagick 95 Display 96 Display Syntax and Options 97 Workshop I: Looking at Some Display Examples 99 Import 101 Import Syntax and Options 101 Workshop II: Looking at Some Import Examples 103 Summary 104 Chapter 6: Animation 105 Animate Syntax and Options 105 How to Display an Animation 106 How to Create an Animation 107 Workshop I: Simple Type Effect 108 Workshop II: Animated Logo 109 Workshop III: Animated Artistic Effects 111 How to make Complex Animations 114 How to Split an Animation into Frames 114 Workshop IV: Multi-Animation Files 115 Summary 118 Chapter 7: Conjure 119 Conjure Syntax and Options 120 What are the Valid Key-Value Pairs for MSL files? 123 Workshop I: Using Multiple MSL Files in One Conjure Call 129 Compare 130 How to Compare Two Images 131 Summary 131 [ iii ] Table of Contents Chapter 8: Practical Web Projects 133 How to call ImageMagick Command-line Utilities within PHP code 133 How to Save the Result of an Online Image Processing Task 135 How to Start Sessions for our Visitors 136 Building a Confirmation-Code Box 137 Online Image Water Marking 143 Summary 146 Chapter 9: An E-Card Application 147 Wizard Step 1: How to Receive Images 148 How to Receive Images from URLs 155 How to Upload Images 157 Wizard Step 2: How to Write Text on Input Images 160 How to Show Image, Image Size, and the Required Fields for Writing Text 162 Wizard Step 3: Final Image 171 Summary 174 Chapter 10: Exciting E-Card Designs 175 E-card A: Simple Letters 175 E-card B: Write on Curved Surfaces 179 E-card C: Carving Technique 181 How to Make Input Text more Flexible 184 Creating a Parameterized Book Cover Generator Page 185 Summary 198 Appendix A: Install New Fonts In ImageMagick 199 Why Don't Some Fonts Work Correctly? 199 How to Identify the Current Installed Fonts 199 Where to Find Fonts and Other Free Resources 202 Free Fonts 203 Free Photos 203 Free Animations 203 How to Define New Fonts for ImageMagick 204 Appendix B: Compression In ImageMagick 207 Compression versus Quality 207 ImageMagick Options for Compression 207 Lossy versus Lossless Compression Algorithms 208 ImageMagick –compress and –quality Options 210 Index 211 [ iv ] Preface ImageMagick ™ was introduced in 1999 by ImageMagick Studio LLC for the first time. It is a graphical application used for performing image processing tasks. It is a powerful collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate images in about 100 formats. In this book, I’ll show how to use the various ImageMagick utilities to create amazing artwork from the command line. You may find doing some image processing tasks with this program is more convenient than using other solutions, like Adobe Photoshop.